IBM to put Watson supercomputer in a pizza box

Slice of cognitive computing, anyone?

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Since its famous televised Jeopardy win in February 2011, Watson, IBM's now-legendary supercomputer, has lost a lot of weight, going from a master-bedroom size solution to one that is about the size of four stacked pizza boxes.

Now Big Blue's researchers are working on squeezing that down even further to a single pizza box while upping the system performance. The current version of Watson is currently 240% more powerful than the edition that won Jeopardy.

Watson is a cognitive solution that is powered by a combination of open source software (Hadoop, SUSE and Apache) and proprietary applications (IBM DeepQA), with 2,880 POWER7 processor cores and 16TB of RAM.

That combination means that Watson is particularly adept at natural language processing, hypothesis generation and dynamic learning. But it's not all work as underlined by a recent announcement that sees Watson transformed into a virtual recipe book, bundled into an app.

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Désiré (Twitter, Google+) has been musing and writing about technology since 1997. Following an eight-year stint at ITProPortal.com where he discovered the joys of global techfests, developing an uncanny attraction for anything silicon, Désiré now heads up TechRadar Pro.